There's a nagging little voice in the back of my head calling me weak or a casual for quitting when facing a challenge. The other part, that I decided to listen to, tells me that if I'm not having fun, I don't have to spend my time playing a game even if I like the concept and it's a modern genre-definer that a ton of people like.
So for largely the same reasons as I once quit the original Dark Souls, I now quit Dark Souls II. I had been progressing at a steady pace, lit the third Primal Bonfire, usually taking a couple of deaths to gather most of the stuff in the area and find the boss, then a few deaths at the boss before beating it. Definitely nothing disheartening in itself, and I was by no means stuck, given the current difficulty. However, the difficulty was definitely a factor that influenced the decision to stop playing after a particular death while running through another area.
My thoughts were plain and simple. "I am not having fun, I don't want to play this anymore." But being who I am, I can't just leave things at that. "Why am I not having fun?" I asked myself. And starting from the end of the story, I figured I could've probably prevented that death. Instead I just charged at the enemy without caution, opting to rely on my heavy armor and tons of Estus. As for why I did that, it's clear - I didn't care to analyze this enemy's moves, to find a strategy to beat it without taking damage, because it would overall probably be faster to just run through it. It's not like I'd encounter them again all that much, I don't need to know their ins and outs. But this just meant I had subconsciously shifted from trying to experience (learn) the game, to trying to get it over with.
While I'd normally enjoy a challenge, because that means I was incapable of using my current pool of experience to easily dismantle the situation, and can thus use this new challenge to gain new experience for further trials... Dark Souls just didn't feel like that kind of challenge to me. I wasn't trying new things. I didn't felt like I was learning new things. Maybe I should have done both, but I didn't need to. My current build and strategies were carrying me through the game just fine, but I wasn't learning how to play better. I was just learning how the game worked.
I'd normally say that a game that isn't too easy and isn't too hard has to be fun because of that precise balance of difficulty alone. One source of fun is definitely learning (but not studying, mind you, which is why we like games but not school), which can't be done when something is so easy you can not learn from it, nor when something is so hard you can not wrap your head around it. But I guess a balanced challenge doesn't always make you learn something from it.
In the case of Dark Souls, I dare say the content is unfair. Far too often I am not given an option to learn upfront, only as a result of getting defeated. I do not wish to re-run the same content multiple times unless I have something left to learn from it, but in many cases here, I didn't. I just needed to get the information that was pretty much only acquirable by dying, and then I could use my already existing knowledge to work out a solution. I guess it's kind of hard to tell the two apart, but really, I didn't approach a boss with a different strategy on the fifth time than the first time. "Dodge or block their attacks, use the downtime when they're not attacking to either heal up or deal damage." And that's a pretty comprehensive guide I was following in my head. I just needed to know what their attacks were and how their downtime worked. Most of the times I died to something new I hadn't seen before. But I couldn't possible prepare for those times.
It's really hard to tell sometimes why I like one game but dislike another. Dark Souls has named a whole genre, meaning it clearly did something that was not only new, but also desired. Sure, the souls-like games, as they're called, aren't really big as a genre, but I've seen a decent bunch of them. I even quite like Salt and Sanctuary, despite it being shockingly similar to Dark Souls. So I can't not recommend Dark Souls, simply because of how influential this game is. Even though I didn't like it, it's a game that I'm glad to have played because of it's higher-than-average historical significance.
No comments:
Post a Comment